Lunchypoo is a stupid little app to help you (and your friends) decide where to go for lunch in the middle of a grueling day of coding.

The idea is that, at any moment, you could browse to lunchypoo.com and get a random, but relevant, suggestion for lunch.

Relevant could take on a lot of meanings, though...

What if Rick is going to lunch with us, and Rick's a vegetarian? What if we just went to BW3 yesterday for lunch and we want something different? (I suggest reload at that point, but hey...) What if we're not at our home office, but on the road at a client site and don't want to drive 1300 miles back home to our regular hangout? What if nobody likes MCL Cafeteria and we're never going to go there for lunch?

So, let's start with the easy ones...

In the original incarnation of Lunchypoo, there was PHP and a hand-entered array of places to choose from. The list was small so as to always be local to my office, widely acceptable to the guys I regulalry went to luch with, and easy to maintain. (In fact, as of this writing, that's what lunchypoo.com serves up.)

However, that's not going to make me a zillion dollars...

So, the next incarnation of Lunchypoo will be a Rails app that will allow other users to add places to the database of potential suggestions. But that means that anyone could add someplace that isn't anywhere near me. So, I might as well filter those places out (based on some acceptable driving distance from me). Enter geocoding...

[Sidebar: there will soon be a branch of Lunchypoo that experiments with the Google Places API to take away the need to maintain my own database of places to eat. That will catapult some other factors for relevancy detection to the fore...see MCL example above.]

I encourage you to jump in and help build this app so that you no longer have to figure out where to eat on your own.

As of this writing, the basics are there. Geocoding of newly entered places works. Random selection of places works. Filtering of places based on distance from a given locaiton works.

What doesn't work to my satisfaction yet is:
- Routing so that the default http://lunchypoo.com returns the random pick
- Allowing the user to specify a current location and radius for search
- Look & Feel

So, again, jump in and help!